German

Robust from the earliest days, German's film industry was one of the world's major exporters during the silent era. That largely shut down (and much of the top talent fled) as the Nazis came to power and postwar German cinema fell into a trap of stale, repetitive escapism. But the "New German Cinema" movement that arrived with the 1960s brought game-changing names (like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog) with a resurgent energy that still hasn't fully abated.